Netflix's Ed Gein Drama Trips Over Its Own Hypocrisy: Not Nearly as Clever as Its Creators Think

Ryan Murphy brought his Monster franchise back with a third outing, and this time he picked a boogeyman the genre has been milking for decades: Ed Gein. The pitch is big swings and bigger stomach-churn, plus a self-aware look in the mirror. The reality? It keeps saying it wants to interrogate our obsession while gleefully feeding it.

The setup: creative license meets a human void

Because Gein was an unreliable narrator and the full scope of his crimes is murky, there is endless room to, let’s say, color outside the lines. Murphy has never been shy about that, and after two controversial seasons focused on Jeffrey Dahmer and then the Menendez brothers (with victims' families rightly calling out their lack of involvement), he dives into his grisliest chapter yet. In theory, the Gein case sidesteps some of those ethical landmines. In practice, it is way too early to say this season is complication-free.

There is also a meta-cinema angle baked in. Gein inspired Leatherface and Norman Bates. The show takes time to trace how directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Tobe Hooper mined his lore without using his name, which is a neat history lesson that also exposes the central contradiction: that is exactly what Murphy is doing here, just with Netflix money and the Monster label.

The 'we are the audience' season

This installment keeps turning the camera on us, sometimes literally. Charlie Hunnam’s Gein breaks the fourth wall in the trailer with a blunt line about our inability to look away, and in episode four he tells two deer hunters who wander into his barn mid-chainsaw, "You shouldn’t be watching this," while the shot angles it straight at the viewer. Four episodes in, the point is less thought-provoking than repetitive.

Ian Brennan, the show’s co-creator, told Variety: "His story was bent and twisted, like a Silly Putty image. And the most interesting layer was turning the camera on ourselves – on Ryan and I, and on the audience. 'Oh, look, we’re doing the same thing. We’re obsessed with this guy.'"

The bigger, ongoing conversation is whether true crime has crossed from curiosity into a content machine that keeps trying to diagnose the undiagnosable. Streamers crank this stuff out and ask us to 'understand' people whose minds most of us have zero interest, training, or ability to decode. The show says it wants to question that appetite while simultaneously feeding it a buffet of the most lurid details imaginable. That tension never resolves; it just keeps selling more tickets to the spectacle.

The thesis, spelled out in highlighter

Ryan Murphy told Tudum: "The thesis statement of every season is: are monsters born or are they made? I think in Ed’s case, it’s probably a little of both."

Totally fair question. But this season repeats the word 'monster' so often it starts to feel like an underlined essay topic rather than a theme. If the writing were sharper, you wouldn’t need to say the quiet part out loud in basically every episode. Instead, the show tells us what to think while staging scenes that dare us to keep watching through our fingers.

Where it goes off the rails

The first episode shows flashes of a tighter, more considered series. Then episode two sends concentration camp prisoners sprinting after Gein across his farm like a tasteless horror vignette. Later, the show has Gein chatting with Nazi war criminal Ilse Koch, who reassures him, "Don’t let anyone call you a monster. You are a human being." Meanwhile the season never lets us forget the ghastly, very real things he did, which it recreates in loving, lingering detail.

By the final stretch, the show tries on a soft-focus redemption angle for elderly Gein. He wanders his psychiatric hospital in a fog and 'meets' future killers like Charles Manson, Ed Kemper, Jerry Brudos, and Richard Speck, as if he’s recognizing the legacy others built off his legend. The symbolism is obvious; the execution is clumsy. It is all meant to add up to a grand statement about complicity. Mostly, it feels like a capital-S Statement glued onto a season that wants to be shocking more than insightful.

The cast, the cameos, the meta-movie stuff

Charlie Hunnam plays Gein. Lesley Manville appears as his mother. Charlie Hall shows up as Frank, who gets one of the season’s nastier hallucinations. The series spends time with the film world too, showing how Hitchcock and Hooper translate Gein into fiction. Anthony Perkins even gets folded into the story via a pre-Psycho prep scene that veers from cheeky to stomach-turning in seconds.

The line-crossing greatest hits

This season is designed to ruin your appetite. Here are a few moments that pushed it from provocative to pointless for me:

• Gein imagines sex with Ilse Koch, only for the scene to reveal he is with a corpse.
• Anthony Perkins is shown multiple human vulvas as part of his 'research' for Norman Bates; the same body parts reappear when officers later raid Gein’s house.
• Frank (Charlie Hall) hallucinates Gein carving up his mother (Lesley Manville) like a Thanksgiving turkey.
• The deer-hunter barn sequence that frames Gein’s chainsaw routine as a don’t-look-but-look dare to the audience.

Commerce wins, as usual

After Gein’s arrest, the show depicts a roadside circus around his house and belongings. There’s even a sign that reads, "See the Plainfield butcher’s actual home!" Visitors look repulsed, then lean in closer at the blood stains and human hair before deciding what they might want to take home. The series argues the true-crime machine really revved up here and never slowed down. Watching the show, we’re part of it.

Which circles back to the hypocrisy problem the series never solves. Murphy has mined Gein-esque horrors before in American Horror Story, and now he’s building an entire season directly on the man’s crimes while scolding the culture for glamorizing them. You can’t wag your finger and cash the check at the same time without at least acknowledging the contradiction. The show doesn’t.

Still, Ian Brennan is bullish:

"I think this is the best season of the three, and I think it’s going to blow people’s socks off."

Bottom line

Monster: The Ed Gein Story wants to be an incisive nature-versus-nurture exploration that reframes true crime. Instead, it over-explains its themes, leans on shock, and trips over its own morality play. There is another Monster season on the way because people watch this stuff, full stop. Maybe that’s a me problem. But when a show keeps telling you it’s about our gaze while doing everything possible to keep your eyes glued to the worst of it, you start to wonder if the mirror it’s holding is just a camera lens pointed back at the audience, no answers attached.